The elephant calls a guy named

When the African elephant has a thing for its friends, it lets out a low grunt that has a tortuous sound structure.

An elephant can even direct its message to the individual it wants by drowning out its friend’s “name” as part of the vocal structure, the US, Kenyan and Norwegian researchers found.

They found out when they observed herds of female elephants and their calves in nature reserves in Kenya and analyzed the recordings they collected of their sounds.

The elephants grunted, for example, when they called their herdmates who were further away, greeted a familiar elephant that came along, and caressed their young.

The name was referred to by the fact that in many situations one individual elephant reacted to the grunt more strongly than the others or was the only one who visibly or audibly reacted. For example, it answered the growler or started coming towards him.

The researchers got confirmation of their conclusion when they later played the grunts they had recorded in the savannah. The same individuals react to them as in the original situations. The study was published Nature Ecology & Evolution – in the science journal.

The analysis of the murmurs also showed that some kind of names are indeed in use. However, they are hidden in the sound structure in such a way that the human ear cannot interpret them. That’s why the researchers resorted to a learning computer program that compared the sounds made by different individuals in different situations.

Very the most interesting observation was that the names seem to be purely symbolic: so they do not try to imitate the named individual’s own pronunciation. It became clear when different grunts of the same elephant were compared with an analysis program.

The versions that included the name of a particular pack member didn’t resemble that guy’s vocalization any more than the other grunts.

The names of elephants seem to be related to the names of people. We also use symbolic sound combinations that do not refer to what the named individual sounds like.

This is where elephants and humans differ from other species that have been observed to use names. Bottlenose dolphins and parrot-like termite arats also form names, but they do so by imitating the individual calls of their mates.

Published in Science in Nature 6/24